ASCII 164
Currency Sign (¤)
Latin-1 Supplement
Latin-1 character.
Common uses & context
Decimal 164 (0xA4) is Currency Sign, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255). Latin-1 character. It renders as '¤' and its binary byte is 10100100.
This is where single-byte ASCII ends and encoding matters. In Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) '¤' is the single byte 0xA4. In UTF-8 — today's default for the web — the same character is the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA4. Treating a Latin-1 byte as UTF-8 (or vice versa) is the usual reason accented letters and symbols turn into mojibake like é or €. The Unicode code point is U+00A4, and in HTML you can write it as ¤ or ¤.
All encodings at a glance
| Decimal | 164 |
| Hexadecimal | 0xA4 |
| Octal | 0244 |
| Binary | 10100100 |
| HTML numeric entity | ¤ |
| HTML named entity | ¤ |
| URL encoding | %A4 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xA4 |
Code snippets
JavaScript
String.fromCharCode(164); // "¤"
164.toString(16); // "a4"Python
chr(164) # control char ¤
ord(chr(164)) # 164
hex(164) # '0xa4'HTML
¤ <!-- named entity -->
¤ <!-- numeric entity -->Programming notes
- ▸Single byte 0xA4 in Latin-1, but the multi-byte sequence 0xC2 0xA4 in UTF-8 — never assume one byte per character above code 127.
- ▸Unicode code point U+00A4; HTML entity ¤.
- ▸If '¤' shows as mojibake, the encoding declared and the encoding used disagree — align both on UTF-8.
Unicode & UTF-8 note
In Unicode this is U+00A4. In UTF-8 it encodes to the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA4. In legacy Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) it is a single byte 0xA4, which is why Latin-1 files often appear as mojibake when interpreted as UTF-8.
Frequently asked questions
What character is ASCII code 164?
ASCII code 164 is the character '¤' (Currency Sign). In hexadecimal it is 0xA4, in octal 0244, and in binary 10100100.
What is 0xA4 in ASCII?
Hexadecimal 0xA4 equals decimal 164, which is the character '¤' (Currency Sign). To convert hex to ASCII yourself, read the two hex digits as a base-16 number (0xA4 = 164) and look up that code point.
How do I write the character with code 164 in code?
In JavaScript use String.fromCharCode(164); in Python use chr(164); in HTML use the numeric entity ¤ or the named entity ¤. In a URL it is percent-encoded as %A4, and in UTF-8 it is stored as the byte sequence 0xC2 0xA4.
Is '¤' part of standard ASCII?
No. Standard ASCII covers codes 0–127 only. '¤' is code 164, part of the Latin-1 Supplement (128–255, sometimes called "extended ASCII"). It is a single byte 0xA4 in Latin-1 but a multi-byte sequence (0xC2 0xA4) in UTF-8.